Archive for July, 2015

The Bamboo Tea Pavilion is located southwest of the city of Lishu in the province of Zhejiang. Songyang is under the “Protection and Development of Traditional Chinese Villages”, the villages are created from the varying slopes of the mountain. Damushan Tea is an important tourist attraction in Songyang. The ancient tea garden is surrounded by mountains and planting of the tea trees form elegant lines within the mist of the mountains, creating a lightweight and poetic beauty. The main concept of the pavilion is developed from the “lightness” of the environment.

It is an installation made with cardboard tubes with a metallic appearance atop a mosaic made of 96,000 wooden pieces.

During the Fallas festival in Valencia held every year the ultimate goal of these installations is to be burned to celebrate the arrival of spring. In this context we built a structure entirely of cardboard and wood joints. The purpose was to investigate to what extent we could carry up this type of structure, and also to place in a traditional context a contemporary image to provoke the debate between tradition and modernity.

The auditorium’s duality arises from the contradiction of its site. On the edge of town, the auditorium faces two realities: the beauty of the coastal landscape and the harsh and fragmented urban context.

The exhibition Argini Variabili, held in the Sala Maier of Pergine Valsugana, exhibits the photos of Andrea Vicentini, a young artist who marries technicity, research and emotional impact. The main theme is Australia, a country he has visited to immortalize its natural landscapes, its cultural ones and the people who live in them.

This project is a self-build pavilion on campus. Responding to the light, it shows unique morphing between different geometries. One is the fern, biological swirl form, and the other is the roof, architectural triangular form. These traditional design motifs seamlessly merge into a livable architecture by using today’s electronic technologies.

50 Lispenard is a seven story refurbishment project located in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. The original building was a garment factory, and is historically protected, thus the extent of the refurbishment was limited to strictly interior improvements, with the exception of a duplex penthouse addition to the roof. The interiors are rich with wood, steel, and concrete, recalling the original industrial function of the building. The duplex penthouse revolves around a double height void and glass bridge overlooking two outdoor roof terraces.

Kurve 7 is a community mall located within a dense residential district in the Eastern part of Bangkok, Krungthep Kreetha 7. Using a series of soft curvature strategies to define, frame, lead, and connect, Stu/D/O is able to realize their goal of creating a new neighborhood commercial space that is linked together by a series of open air garden and public space rather than creating a large enclosed community mall.

Since 2001, the centre of Zaanstad has been transformed to agree with the style of the nearby UNESCO World Heritage site the Zaanse Schans. Architectural highlights of this requirement include the city hall in shape of oversized Zaan houses and the Inntel hotel, which appears as a large stack of the same green houses. The new Cultural Cluster is the next step in this urban plan. The question was raised of how to continue the Zaan style given these existing variations of the traditional house, and also how to secure a clear identity for each of the established cultural institutions within the larger envelope of a single building.

Few young architects under the age of 30 can boast of two completed commissions in their portfolios like Ondrej Chybik and Michal Kristof, the founders of Chybik+Kristof Associated Architects. Their first commission – a modular cafeteria for KOMA MODULAR in Vizovice – was completed in May 2014; the second­­ – the Czech pavilion at EXPO 2015 in Milan – was inaugurated exactly a year later. Both designs draw on the simplicity of modernist architecture, creating dynamic spaces of high aesthetic value. Their buildings are innovative in terms of the introduction of new materials and their combinations into modular construction. While the Czech EXPO pavilion expectedly attracts media attention, it is rarely mentioned that it could never have been so successfully achieved without Chybik+Kristof AA’s previous experience with modular systems at Vizovice.